Customer Experience

Watch Out…Customer Experience Innovations Can Come From Where You Least Expect Them

Megan Burns — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:21:33 +0000

Last week I posted some of the most frequently asked questions we get about the Customer Experience Index, 2012. One question I didn't include but should have is "Who got the highest score in my industry?"

I scanned the list of industry high scores and wasn't surprised to see names like USAA (banks, credit card providers, insurance providers), Apple (consumer electronics manufacturers), and Southwest Airlines. But there were names we don't hear about as much in customer experience like Morgan Stanley Smith Barney (investment firms), Bright House Networks (ISPs), US Cellular (Wireless service providers), and Dish Network/EchoStar (TV service providers)*.

To me this says that brands trying to differentiate on the basis of customer experience need to look in a variety of places for possible competitive threats and standard-setters, not just the most obvious ones. History is full of examples of small firms that could transform more quickly than their larger competitors or introduce a disruptive innovation that no one saw coming. I expect both those scenarios to play out in customer experience over the next few years. The question is just where and when.

As part of our research in 2012 you can be sure we're going to look into what these lesser talked about brands are doing to raise the bar in their industries, but in the meantime here are two of my favorite examples of CX innovations that came from places I would have never thought to look:

Pharmacy Customer Experience Flaws -- Why Communication Is Key In Healthcare

Liz Boehm — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:24:35 +0000

The other day I was at a major retailer's pharmacy refilling a prescription. While I waited for my refill, a woman came in to refill her three prescriptions. She was clutching a $10 bill, and seemed to know exactly what she needed and what it would cost. The pharmacy tech found her scripts and informed her that she owed $17.35. The woman was shocked. She verified that the right scripts were in the bag and then asked what had happened. Two of the scripts, she said, were $4 each, and the other was usually $1.99. The pharmacist explained that one of the prescriptions had been taken off the $4 generic list.

The customer was both angry and scared. This was her essential heart medication, after all. Her frustration was understandable -- the cost of one of her prescriptions had just nearly tripled, from $4 to $11.35. Likewise her fear. Prescription refill rules mean she can't have a stockpile of pills at home to tide her over until she could find a more cost-effective option -- not to mention that she might need to get a new prescription from her doctor or deal with the delay of transferring her script to another pharmacy.

And, worse, no one had told her. She thought she had taken care of everything to manage her health -- getting to the pharmacy, bringing her money, taking her pills faithfully as prescribed. She asked the pharmacist why no one had told her. He mumbled that they don't do that.

Improve, Transform, Or Sustain: What’s Your Path To A Better Customer Experience?

Kerry Bodine — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:16:50 +0000

If you're reading this post, there's probably at least one person in your company (you) who's already working to improve your customer experience in some way. That means your company's CX efforts fall somewhere on the curve below.

Improve: This is where most companies start their customer experience initiatives. Typically, a small group implements a voice of the customer program, prioritizes customer feedback, and routes it to different parts of the organization so that they can make changes. Some employees might adopt new customer-focused work practices, but these efforts remain ad-hoc or siloed. The net result is incremental customer experience improvements.

Transform: At a certain point, some companies decide that they want to leverage customer experience in order to create a jump in customer loyalty, accelerate growth, and differentiate themselves from competitors. When that happens, incremental customer experience improvements are no longer sufficient. The company begins to change just about every part of the business -- including processes, policies, technologies, and incentives -- to focus on the needs of customers.

Sustain: For companies that decide to take the path towards transformation, this is the end goal. Once a company puts customers at the center of all business operations, employees need to figure out how to sustain the new ways of working so that they can continue to deliver a great customer experience indefinitely.

Frequently Asked Questions About Forrester's Customer Experience Index, 2012

Megan Burns — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:57:20 +0000

Since publishing our Customer Experience Index, 2012 last week, we've gotten a flood of questions about the research, methodology, and results. I'm putting the finishing touches on a full Forrester report that answers the ten most common questions but thought I'd give everyone a sneak preview with a blog post summarizing a few of the answers.

1. Who are the people rating the brands in Forrester's Customer Experience Index?

To produce the CXi each year, Forrester conducts an online survey of US individuals ages 18 to 88. This year, there were 7,638 such folks who answered the survey during October 2011. We weighted the data by age, gender, income, broadband adoption, and region to demographically represent the adult US online population. The sample was drawn from members of MarketTools' online panel, and respondents were motivated by receiving points that can be redeemed for a reward.

2. Which touchpoints are consumers rating when they answer the CXi questions?

The short answer to this question is "any touchpoints they used to interact with the brand." We don't direct consumers to think about any specific touchpoints as they rate their interactions. Instead, we want them to consider all of their interactions with that brand over the past 90 days, regardless of how they happened.

Forrester’s Fifth Annual Customer Experience Index Shows Excellence Is Exceedingly Rare

Megan Burns — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:42:10 +0000

Today we published Forrester's 2012 Customer Experience Index (CXi). It's our fifth annual benchmark of customer experience quality as judged by the only people whose opinion matters -- customers. The CXi is based on research conducted at the end of 2011 and reflects how consumers perceived their experiences with 160 brands across 13 industries to be.

For those new to the index, let me explain how it works. The process has three steps:

We ask more than 7,600 consumers to identify companies they do business with in 13 different industries.
We ask them to tell us how well each firm met their needs, how easy the firm was to work with, and how enjoyable it was to work with. We ask these questions at the brand level to get a sense of their overall experience with the company regardless of channel.
For all three questions, we calculate each firm's CXi score by subtracting the percentage of its customers who reported a bad experience from the percentage who reported a good experience. The overall CXi is an average of those three results.

So what did this year's results tell us? They told us:

Bad Reasons For NOT Having A Chief Customer Officer

Paul Hagen — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:32:53 +0000

I recently updated our research on enterprisewide customer experience leaders, who we refer to as "chief customer officers" or CCOs. While they often don't have that exact title, we identified around 600 individuals who carry a mandate to improve the end-to-end customer experience at their company. We did some deeper research on close to 200 of them in order to understand the general profile of these people as well as how their positions are structured within their companies.

Forrester has witnessed a marked increase in the position over the past six years. And for good reason: Competitive forces are shifting dramatically in what we call the "age of the customer" (from Forrester report "Why Customer Experience? Why Now?"). Firms struggle to compete on product innovation alone, as global outsourcing and cloud-based computing lower barriers to entry and create scores of substitutes. Customer power has grown, as 73% of firms trust recommendations from friends and family, while only 19% trust direct mail (from Forrester report "Consumer "Ad-itudes" Stay Strong"). Firms have turned to customer experience as a way to differentiate in this commoditized world, which has led to the surge in CCOs. In my new report, I profiled key characteristics of CCOs as well as models for the kinds of organizations they oversee.

At the same time, as high-profile firms like Fidelity, The Washington Post, and General Motors have put in place senior customer experience leaders over the past year or so, I've been struck by the wide assortment of reasons that firms use to rationalize NOT putting a chief customer officer in place.

Forrester’s 2012 Customer Experience Predictions

Kerry Bodine — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:13:06 +0000

2011 was a pivotal year for the field of customer experience. A major increase in the number and types of consumer technologies had a wide-ranging impact on daily life: People controlled their TVs with tablets, asked their phones questions, and played video games without using physical controllers. The extensive reach of these changes -- and the screaming pace at which they happened -- triggered a corporate awakening to the value of great customer interactions.

Brisk consumer technology adoption may have been the ultimate driver of many customer experience initiatives in 2011. But an increasingly competitive industry landscape, the ever-increasing power of consumers, and a slippery economy will be the major drivers of customer experience efforts in 2012.

In our latest report, Ron Rogowski and I outline what these market drivers mean for customer experience professionals in the year ahead -- and what they'll need to do to keep up. The report includes predictions for how organizations will change the way they work, what types of interactions they'll focus on, and the resulting implications for customer experience vendors. For example:

Want To Know How Your 2012 Customer Experience Plans Compare To Others? Take Our Benchmarking Survey To Find Out.

Megan Burns — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 19:02:08 +0000

Calling all customer experience professionals! It's that time of year again . . . time for Forrester to take a snapshot of what's going on inside customer experience programs around the globe.

Want to see how your company's 2012 plans stack up? All it takes is 10 minutes. Complete Forrester's Q4 2011 Customer Experience Survey, which will ask you a few questions about:

Your company's goals and objectives for customer experience in 2012.
How your organization manages customer experience on a daily basis.
The customer experience categories you plan to funnel budget into for 2012.

Once the survey closes in mid-December, we'll analyze the data and write a summary report titled "The State Of Customer Experience, 2012." We'll send you a copy of that report when it publishes in January -- even if you're not a Forrester client.

Thanks in advance for helping with our research. This data will fuel not only this report but also much of our other research throughout the coming year.

(By the way, this survey is for customer experience professionals who are working to improve customer interactions with their own companies. Agency employees, technology vendors, and consultants should take a pass on this one. There will be surveys for you later in the year.)

Help Forrester Make Its 2012 Customer Experience Predictions!

Kerry Bodine — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 10:39:14 +0000

It's that time of the year again . . . Most of you are well into your 2012 planning, and at Forrester, we've also got our eyes on the year ahead.

But first, we're taking a look back. Ron Rogowski and I recently revisited our 2011 customer experience predictions report and chatted about what's happened over the past 10 months.

In some cases, our predictions were accurate (if we do say so ourselves). For example, we said that tech vendors would engage in an "all-out war to own the customer experience management space" and that it would create a "confusing marketplace that will not shake out in 2011." We also said that "customer service will gain popularity as a key opportunity for engagement." Given our ongoing research and client conversations, we think these predictions were spot on.

And on a few points, we missed the mark. When we wrote our last doc, people had just started hacking the Kinect for Xbox 360 to create fun demos like real-time light sabers and digital shadow puppets. We wrote, "In 2011, we'll see companies start to leverage this technology, too, with healthcare (think guided physical therapy exercises) and marketing (a la interactive product demos) diving in first." Well, we haven't exactly seen a tsunami of activity in this area. But were we way off? Or did we just jump the gun? Only time will tell!

In either case, the fun continues.

Ron and I are collaborating again on our 2012 CX predictions report -- and we want to know what you think. So here's your chance for fame and fortune -- or at least the opportunity to be mentioned in a Forrester report! If your ideas or comments contribute to our final analysis, we'll add you as a contributor to the research.

Making Customer Experience Relevant Behind The Scenes

Paul Hagen — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 20:58:48 +0000

"Customer experience is everyone's business" is a mantra that I often hear from customer experience leaders. Of course, it's true. The entire purpose of a company as an entity is to provide value to customers in exchange for a payment. Every activity that the company performs is part of the ecosystem that delivers the perceived value that a customer receives.

But connecting the dots to those behind the scenes from IT to logistics planners and compliance individuals challenges many customer experience leaders . . . as well as the leaders of those behind-the-scenes departments. I'm feeling this challenge poignantly right now as I prepare a keynote speech for Forrester's joint Infrastructure & Operations and Security Forums coming up in a few weeks. Let me share a few pointers that I've gathered from customer experience leaders who helped guide my thinking:

Sourcing & Vendor Management: A Key Driver In The Customer Experience Ecosystem

Kerry Bodine — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 13:34:17 +0000

Many customer experience initiatives don't meet their full potential -- or worse, fail completely -- because companies don't have a complete picture of the dynamics that go into creating it. In order to break from their tunnel vision, companies need to understand their customer experience ecosystem: the complex set of relationships among a company's employees, partners, and customers that determines the quality of all customer interactions.

In their quest to seek out the root causes of customer experience issues, companies often overlook the impact of sourcing and vendor management (SVM) professionals -- often referred to as "procurement" by the rest of the organization. That's too bad, because these decision-makers influence the customer experience in two key ways.

They influence which technologies and tools will be purchased. Some of these technologies are used internally. One example is: customer relationship management software, which enables employees across the organization to better understand customers and their ongoing relationships with the company. Other tools -- like content management systems -- directly affect the information that customers can access through digital touchpoints like the Web and mobile devices.

They shape the nature of service-based partner relationships. Some partners -- like interactive agencies -- help from behind the scenes to design and develop customer interactions. In contrast, partners like outsourced call centers and service technicians have direct contact with customers every single day.

Chief Customer Officer (CCO) Roundtable On CX Maturity

Paul Hagen — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 00:47:21 +0000

"Customer experience (CX) maturity" was the topic of Forrester's recent chief customer officer (CCO) roundtable meeting. Based on a recent report by Megan Burns called "Customer Experience Maturity Defined," the customer experience leaders present took Forrester's self-test of key CX practices, discussed their own company's strengths and weaknesses, and shared successes and challenges they faced at their companies in interactive discussions throughout the day.

Here are some of the highlights from the discussion.

Governance and project investment. A significant portion of the discussion revolved around customer experience governance and getting funds for projects. There was clear agreement in the room on needing CX leaders at the top levels of management. For instance, the CCOs were saying:

"Customer experience loses at the corporate budgeting level. You need to be there or have an exec like the CFO fighting for you there."
"Get on the decision-making body for investments and make sure you at least have veto power over projects."
"When I'm making the business case for CX-related projects and pushing it up to the C-level, I always build ranges into the outcomes (e.g., reduce churn by 0.5% [worst case], 1% [middle case], and 2% [best case]; increase word of mouth by 2% [worst case], 5% [middle case], 10% [best case]). I get less argument about even the low number . . . people are overly optimistic."

One of the most interesting discussions focused on getting risk/compliance people into the process:

Why Customer Experience? Why Now?

Kerry Bodine — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 13:38:12 +0000

For decades, companies have been promising to delight customers, while simultaneously disappointing them in nearly every channel. That tactic won't cut it anymore. Why not? We've entered a new era that Forrester calls the age of the customer -- a time when focus on the customer matters more than any other strategic imperative. In the age of the customer, companies find that:

Commoditization has stripped away existing sources of differentiation. Competitive barriers of the past like manufacturing strength, distribution power, and information mastery can't save you today -- one by one, each of these corporate investments has been commoditized.
Traditional industry boundaries have dissolved. Companies in every industry find themselves competing with new types of competitors -- automakers with services like Zipcar, newspapers with Google News, travel agents with Expedia, and the entire retail industry with eBay.
Customers have more power than ever. With online reviews, social networks, and mobile web access, it's easy for your customers to know more about your products, services, competitors, and pricing than you -- and to share their opinions of your company with their friends.

Those are the global business trends. But what specific business benefits can companies expect to gain from customer experience investments? Every firm in every industry can leverage great customer experiences to:

The Greatest Thing To Come Out Of The Mind Of The Late, Great Steve Jobs: His Perspective

Harley Manning — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 20:45:06 +0000

Those of us who work in the field of customer experience are especially hard hit by the passing of Steve Jobs. He symbolized the power of experience -- how much a great experience can transform a product, a business, an industry, and even our daily lives.

Do you remember personal computers before the mouse, how you bought and listened to music before iTunes and the iPod, or how many animated films you watched in theaters -- with or without the kids -- before Pixar?

Steve Jobs even changed the way many of us think. If you own an iPhone or an iPad, you've probably found, as I have, that you don't bother to memorize very much anymore. Why should you when you can dig up facts anytime, anywhere with just a few taps on a touchscreen?

Now please don't get me wrong: I don't idealize the man. For one thing, many people contributed to the success of everything I just mentioned. And not all Apple experiences are perfect, and Jobs didn't succeed at everything he did (remember the NeXT Computer?).

But to go cynical is to miss the point, or more specifically, the point of view -- the one that makes Jobs an icon for customer experience professionals. He put it out there when he famously said, "You've got to start with the customer experience and work back to the technology -- not the other way around."

Frankly, "the other way around" is how most companies still operate. Not just technology companies but firms in every industry. Someone has an idea (maybe great, maybe not), and that turns into a product or service in the marketplace. The customer experience that results is whatever it turns out to be.

The Frustrating Pursuit Of Experience Design Excellence In Healthcare

Liz Boehm — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 15:57:55 +0000

I had a meeting yesterday with a very well-respected experience design agency. The purpose was to try to identify opportunities within the healthcare sector (writ large) for the kind of work that they do. Its approach sits between what a traditional agency does (which focuses on campaigns and visual design) and what a consultant/systems integrator does (which focuses on technical architecture and systems design). Its focus is on designing technology-based experiences that are engineered -- from the back end to the front -- to meet users' needs.

We could collectively identify a plethora of opportunities where healthcare firms (payers and providers) could benefit from its services: health insurance member service sites that need a user-centered re-engineering to achieve their self-service mission; wellness initiatives that need to engage users in difficult and sometimes-unappealing tasks; patient communication platforms for hospitals; and even EMR interfaces to streamline clinician workflow.

Where we struggled was to find the buyers with the vision and appetite to undertake the kinds of changes these experience overhauls would entail. On the health insurance side, we stumbled up against the fact that the typical website/mobile solution owner has no control over the content presented on digital platforms (and most of that content can best be described as inscrutable). She also often has little ability to access the kinds of source data (read claims, billing, and benefits data and rules) that would enable her to display meaningful information online -- as opposed to simply regurgitating the incomplete content that is distributed to health insurance consumers in offline media.

Customer Experience

Watch Out…Customer Experience Innovations Can Come From Where You Least Expect Them

Categories:

Pharmacy Customer Experience Flaws -- Why Communication Is Key In Healthcare

Improve, Transform, Or Sustain: What’s Your Path To A Better Customer Experience?

Frequently Asked Questions About Forrester's Customer Experience Index, 2012

Categories:

Forrester’s Fifth Annual Customer Experience Index Shows Excellence Is Exceedingly Rare

Categories:

Bad Reasons For NOT Having A Chief Customer Officer

Categories:

Forrester’s 2012 Customer Experience Predictions

Want To Know How Your 2012 Customer Experience Plans Compare To Others? Take Our Benchmarking Survey To Find Out.

Help Forrester Make Its 2012 Customer Experience Predictions!

Making Customer Experience Relevant Behind The Scenes

Categories:

Sourcing & Vendor Management: A Key Driver In The Customer Experience Ecosystem

Chief Customer Officer (CCO) Roundtable On CX Maturity

Categories:

Why Customer Experience? Why Now?

The Greatest Thing To Come Out Of The Mind Of The Late, Great Steve Jobs: His Perspective

Categories:

The Frustrating Pursuit Of Experience Design Excellence In Healthcare

Categories: